Introduction and proposed contribution

[Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Good afternoon,

Before going further, I'd like to introduce myself as this is my first
posting to this list though I've come across many familiar names in
the postings.  My name is Alex Midence and I am an aspiring
wet-behind-the-ears c++ programmer by night and a professional trainer
by day.  I've been learning my way around Emacspeak over the last few
months and have grown extremely fond of the package and am continually
impressed with the degree of productivity it offers one.  I would like
to contribute something to the community in return for this amazing
app.

I've noticed in my learning of Emacspeak that, while there are plenty
of reference materials, the number of up-to-date tutorial-style
documents geared towards a raw newbie are somewhat sparse and spread
out and are written in a way that someone coming from a strong Ms
Windows background would find rather laborious to follow, increasing
their learning curve unnecessarily.  This is probably because a lot of
it was written by people who have used Linux for longer than Windows
has been accessible (oh, what a battle that has been!) and, as is the
case with many a developer, are more comfortable writing code than
writing documents.  Here's where I come in because, right now, I'm
just the opposite.  =)

What I propose to do is to write a simple tutorial for newcomers to
Emacspeak geared towards people who are new to command line, Linux and
Emacs as well.  I do this sort of thing for a living and it would give
me enormous satisfaction to make this contribution to Emacspeak as it
has done a lot for me in recent weeks to help me learn to code faster
and also to do things I never imagined an editor could do for me.
Trouble is, while I am a decent writer and pretty good at teaching, I
am still learning Emacs and Emacspeak myself so, from time to time, I
may post questions to you all as I put this together.  I will set it
up as an html document with accompanying audio files illustrating
certain points of interest.  It's also going to be submitted to the
documentation subproject of Vinux as we are exploring the option to
include Emacspeak with future distributions either as a pre-installed
package or as an easy install script which users can run to set it up
for them.  Your feedback, guidance, patience and forebearance with
this hackfisted newcomer will be most humbly appreciated.  Also, if,
when it is done, those of you who use or distribute other versions of
Linux wish to see about modifying some of it to better fit your
distribution, I would be happy to help with that as well, just let me
know.  I'll be taking it one step at a time.  I want to do this right
such that it benefits people for a long time to come so, I don't want
to rush things too much.

Thanks.
Alex M

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address on the
emacspeak list send mail to "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a
subject of "unsubscribe" or "help".